Contemporary furniture is an excellent choice for a living room. Contemporary furniture tends to have straight, geometric lines and has a look many people would call “sleek.” Other types of contemporary furniture are classed as biomorphic, or designed along the lines of living things, like Arne Jacobsen’s egg chair.

Contemporary furniture might look a bit uncomfortable, but aside from being aesthetically pleasing, any piece of furniture should be comfortable. Even electric radiators can now be designed in a way that complements modern furniture. In other words, no more silver painted coils that bang on cold mornings!

Many designers of contemporary furniture believe in the concepts of “form follows function” and of total environment. In the first concept, the furniture’s shape and material have to be relevant to what the furniture does in a room. In the other, the space has to be used efficiently. This means modules, walls within walls, bookshelves arranged in the room to form hallways and units that can be moved around to divide the space into separate areas.

Many contemporary furniture styles can be traced back to the Bauhaus school, a design school established by Walter Gropius, an architect of Weimar Germany. This school especially empathized function and simple, clean lines. One of their most famous creations is the Barcelona chair, a metal and leather chair designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, who weren’t furniture designers as much as they were architects.

Also, when it comes to modern furniture, nothing seems to stand out more than chairs. Designers like Eero Saarinen, Arne Jacobsen and Eero Aarnio had a great deal of fun with their chairs. For example, there’s Saarinen’s womb chair, which, allegedly, looks like a womb, George Nelson’s Coconut chair, which looks like a cross section of coconut, Saarinen’s famous tulip chair and Aarnio’s mushroom chair, which is often rendered in willow or rattan and looks something like a button mushroom. There’s also the famous, pivoting Eames chair, made of metal and tufted leather. Complementing these chairs are end tables and coffee tables, sometimes severe in their lines, like the nested Parsons tables created by students at the Parsons school of design and sometimes beautiful and flowing, like sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s glass topped table from 1950. Lacquered stacking cubes in all kinds of colors can be moved around the room and used for absolutely anything, from end tables, to seats, to pedestals for artwork. Since they’re hollow and open at one end, they can even be flipped over and turned into planters.

Contemporary lighting seems to come in any sort of shape that can be imagined. Some lights are S-curved and filled with tiny crystals, some are chandeliers made of different sized bulbs dangling on strings from lucite panels. Even the light bulbs have advanced as fluorescent bulbs are designed to shed warmer light and long lasting halogen bulbs and LEDs are used more and more for the home. Once again, the homeowner now has a selection of electric radiators that will also go very well with this futuristic decor.

4 Comments

Contemporary is the common term used for defining modern furniture today. I like the “form follows function” concept. The shape and material of furniture plays and important part in the comfort and purpose for which particular furniture is being used. Shape of the furniture should be adjustable according to its use in the room.